Blog do Curso de Medicina da Universidade Estadual de Maringá para a discussão de temas de Educação Médica, Educação das Profissões da Saúde e áreas correlatas.
Blog of University of Maringá Medical School for the discussion of issues of Medical Education, Health Professions Education and related areas.

segunda-feira, 25 de maio de 2015

Science frauds

What’s Behind Big Science Frauds?

By ADAM
MARCUS and IVAN ORANSKY

IN December, Science
published a paper claiming that people could change their minds about same-sex
marriage after talking for just 20 minutes with a gay person. It seemed too
good to be true — and it was.

Retractions can be good things, since
even scientists often fail to acknowledge their mistakes, preferring instead to
allow erroneous findings simply to wither away in the back alleys of
unreproducible literature. But they don’t surprise those of us who are familiar
with how science works; we’re surprised only that retractions aren’t even more
frequent.

Remember that
study showing vaccines were linked to autism? The time scientists claimed to
have cloned human embryonic stem cells? Or
that simple, easy way that was supposed to revolutionize the creation of such
stem cells?

Those were all frauds published in
the world’s top scientific journals — The Lancet, Science and Nature. The
vaccine scare has been associated with a surge in cases of measles, some of
them deadly.

Every day, on average, a scientific
paper is retracted because of misconduct. Two percent of scientists admit to
tinkering with their data in some kind of improper way. That number might
appear small, but remember: Researchers publish some 2 million articles a year,
often with taxpayer funding. In each of the last few years, the Office of
Research Integrity, part of the United States Department of Health and Human
Services, has sanctioned a dozen or so scientists for misconduct ranging from
plagiarism to fabrication of results.

Not
surprisingly, the problem appears to get worse as the stakes get higher. The
now-discredited paper on gay marriage — by Michael J. LaCour, a graduate
student at U.C.L.A., and Donald P. Green, a political scientist at Columbia,
who requested a retraction after his co-author failed to produce the raw data
— had all the elements: headline-grabbing research, in a top journal, on a
hot topic.

But dishonest scholars aren’t the
only guilty ones. Science fetishizes the published paper as the ultimate marker
of individual productivity. And it doubles down on that bias with a concept
called “impact factor” — how likely the studies in a given journal are to be
referenced by subsequent articles. The more “downstream” citations, the theory
goes, the more impactful the original article.

Except
for this: Journals with higher impact factors retract papers more often than those
with lower impact factors. It’s not clear why. It could be that these prominent
periodicals have more, and more careful, readers, who notice mistakes. But
there’s another explanation: Scientists view high-profile journals as the
pinnacle of success — and they’ll cut corners, or worse, for a shot at glory.

And while those
top journals like to say that their peer reviewers are the most authoritative
experts around, they seem to keep missing critical flaws that readers pick up
days or even hours after publication — perhaps because journals rush peer
reviewers so that authors will want to publish their supposedly groundbreaking
work with them.

Most science and health reporters
rely on the top journals for news leads. They tend to move in a pack,
descending on a small handful of news items each week. When the papers in those
journals have the fillip of a hot topic, like sex or race, the frenzy is even
greater. And yet many reporters fail to do the necessary due diligence before
publishing their work. The drive for scoops is even greater in journalism than
it is in science.

Economists like to say there are no
bad people, just bad incentives. The incentives to publish today are corrupting
the scientific literature and the media that covers it. Until those incentives
change, we’ll all get fooled again.